--- On Mon, 9/22/08, A.Vijayakumar <vijay@...> wrote:

45th and 46th Known Mersenne Primes Discovered
Computers at the UCLA Department of Mathematics recently discovered the
45th known Mersenne prime, 243,112,609 - 1, a prime with almost 13 million
digits, while the 46th known Mersenne prime, 237,156,667 - 1, which has
over 11 million digits, was discovered later by a computer in Cologne,
Germany (a Mersenne prime is one of the form 2p -1 , where p is prime).
Both discoveries are part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
(GIMPS), a distributed computing project. The larger prime was the first
known prime of 10 million digits or more, which earned the UCLA Department
of Mathematics a prize of US$50,000 from the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Edson Smith, of the UCLA Mathematics Computing Group who
installed and maintained the searching software at UCLA, has posted a FAQ
about the discovery. GIMPS founder George Woltman says that the project
will soon offer a prize of $150,000 for the discovery of the first
100-million digit prime. [Item posed 9/17/08]





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Dr.Ambat Vijayakumar
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Department of Mathematics
Cochin University of Science &Technology
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